I’ve been creating commissioned illustrations for almost 50 years, first using traditional mediums like pencils and acrylic paint, and now-a-days using the top-of-the-line, bleeding edge A.I.-empowered digital tools. I’ve never been more empowered as an illustrator!
I understand the problems facing our industry with regards to AI “taking over” whole segments of the work-force. Advertising and Marketing are particularly susceptible to the effects of this technology development, and many photographers and illustrators should be worried if they don’t know how to co-opt these tools for their own protection. In my case, I’ve seen my segment of an industry shut down several times in my career. My reaction was to absorb the new changes and adopt the tools for my own purposes. In this case, I’ve co-opted AI as a compliment to my Photoshop skills, and integrated this powerful tool into my workflow.
I was recently commissioned to create an editorial image for a Blog post on the website of Living Well Stores, a company that sells power mobility scooters and power wheelchairs. For decades, I was often commissioned to do retouch work in photoshop. Some clients had me mashing up photos manually, like adding cows into a photo with people!
Waaaaay back before AI, I used Photoshop in a time consuming process of digital painting and cobbling together bit’s and pieces of backgrounds to fill in the missing objects or blend something into the photo convincingly.
This recent commission was for an article on Mobility Scooters and how one company was doing a better job of tracking those Scooters with new Tag devices. The job for Living Well Stores was a rush with a small budget, and I didn’t want to spend hours looking through Stock photos for the perfect airport terminal interior, and a mobility scooter with a rider that would fit into this scene convincingly, with appropriate lighting and perspective, that I would then have to painfully stitch together. My time, along with the stock photo licensing fees, make this small commission a challenge for both client and illustrator.
Enter AI, or ChatGBT’s most recent image-maker. I used the most recent edition of Open.AI’s DALLE. There are others, and depending on the type of image you are creating, you might want to try others out there. AI is a powerful tool for generating visual ideas quickly, and if you already have a scene in your mind’s eye, write that out in as full detail as you can. AI can be a complete waste of time if you don’t provide a very detailed, “contextually-rich prompt” to get a solid base to work with.
My first attempt at a prompt was rather lean on context: “Create an image of travelers in a busy, modern airport, with a woman in a mobility scooter on her way to catch a flight.”
However, my first prompt’s results provided me with an idea instantly. Just some quick digital work and I could be done in 3-4 minutes. All I needed to do is change the Flight Information and display information, and REMOVE the jet that DALLE placed INSIDE an airport terminal. (This is “Artificial Intelligence”, and this is a great example of why AI cannot be left alone to service ANY client, as this piece of software has never had the experience of being in an airport, and would not understand why this image wouldn’t work.)
Photoshop has several ways to deal with removing objects, and I am not about to provide a tutorial on that trick when you can go to YouTube to learn how to do this. The point is, this is an easy job these days with the help of AI, whether you use an AI image generating service or you are using the new BETA version of Photoshop with these powerful tools embedded into the application. In this situation, I used Photoshop BETA to remove the jet from the terminal, I recreated the typography on the display, and mocked up something that looked like a map, with an indicator in hot pink to illustrate the concept that the mobility scooter was being tracked.
In my view, the whole job was wrapped up quite successfully in terms of my production time, and the client’s satisfaction with my quick turn-around of a nice photo-based illustration of a complicated topic.
